Just a bit of art to round out my weekend. USS Pioneer model by Foomandoonian, with Poser conversion by Mattymanx, via www.foundation3d.com. Shuttlecraft by XCalPro. Background by FrostBo. DAZ Studio render.

Eh. It's all made up tech anyway and it seems the "two nacelles necessary" went out the window in 1976, so... why four? Maybe better acceleration? Maybe longer sustained use? I can also go with "it looks cooler"

Personally I'm not a big fan of the four-nacelle designs, but for some reason this one clicks with me.

Gorgeous colors... And that teeny tiny shuttlecraft is just a perfect touch. Nice little Easter egg for people wearing their glasses.

That Pioneer design, though... I agree with some of the initial reservations you expressed in some of the comments. Looks like it's on steroids. You know what they say, "Huge nacelles = tiny shuttlecraft" every time...

Coincidentally, I was just looking at this ship yesterday. I was updating the freebies list for the thread at the DAZ forum and discovering Mattymanx's cornucopia of conversions. He's been a bizzy, bizzy boy. Even though I'm not much of a "ship person," I'm still all tingly from the thrill. We've got to start up the Ship of the Month Club again. We could have an all space station, all shuttlecraft, all dry dock... hell, we could even have an all travel pod line up for the voting. I'd like to do an all Romulan War line up, but we need to get some Romulan war era Romulan ships to shoot at first, I guess...

I hate the whole "four nacelle" thing and avoided this ship like the plague... until I saw Drell-7 do something cool with it. Once I had the model I realized it had all kinds of juicy details and sexy camera angles! But four nacelles is still silly. I figure the Federation had to try it ONCE, just to see what it would be like. So this (in the Arcasverse) is a one-of-a-kind ship. A sort of aborted engineering pathfinder project... kinda like Buran.

Thanks. I really like just finding a cool background image and taking my cues from it, running in whatever color direction it points to I rarely start out thinking, "Gee - I really feel like making a piece with a strong aqua color statement!"